Category Software

Æsthetics, Usability and Determining Who's Boss.

Æsthetics and usability go hand in hand. Because many people are visual beings, they function better when they work in a beautiful environment. And that extends to computing. So those two go together. In typography this is pretty obvious whenever you’ve got to use (even for a short while) a Windows machine: Cleartype, now the […]

No Upgrades Here.

I'm not sure if this is a political stunt by Microsoft, or if they are really going to go forward with it. If they are it is insane: By not giving Europeans the capability to upgrade their operating system, like it has done for more than twenty years and at the same time trying to put the blame on the European Commission for doing so (while not providing any specific reasons for doing so), Microsoft is really shooting itself in the foot; from a PR point of view it's a pretty bad strategy that's almost certainly going to backfire. At any rate, I feel so sorry for all those people that are going to want to upgrade from a poor OS like Vista to a mediocre one like Windows 7 and having to do a full reinstall [let alone pay the premium of getting the full version].

Not so Heavy and definitely not Crap.

Definitely still Taiwanese though. =) Of course, it'd be too early to tell whether the Hero, or, indeed, Android will become a success, but if anything, the new HTC Hero will be remembered as the device that started the custom Android experience era. From the company that, according to Microsoft's own statements and some simple arithmetic, makes 80% of Windows Mobile handsets comes a beautiful 'port' and of its popular TouchFlo interface but with a twist. It may be true that the Hero only sports skin-deep improvements to Android, but with the platform rapidly evolving and with 18 to 20 Android powered devices due by year's end, it is already looking like a fantastic alternative to the ageing, craptastic Windows Mobile platform that HTC has depended upon since its earliest days. If anything, contrary to Nokia, HTC seems to 'get' how important the User Experience is.

We don’t have 64 bit support for Linux in 3.5

That's for Tracemonkey, the new, somewhat faster javascript engine that's included with Firefox 3.5. Don't be alarmed then when Firefox 3.5 performs only marginally faster on javascript heavy sites than Firefox 3.0. No 64bit support for the new javascript engine, on the platform where Firefox pretty much dominates. In my view, that should've been Mozilla's first priority on Linux: many linux users choose 64bit because they are not hindered by missing drivers or applications. Linux users are typically more computer-savvy than your average windows or OS X users and could serve as good guinea pigs for a 64bit version of Tracemonkey. In any case, irrespectively of operating system, Tracemonkey 'feels' slower than Nitro (or v8) in 32bits too, but giving 64bit linux such a low priority is somewhat dumb, especially given the ever increasing interest and market share for 64bit linux among linux users (after years of requests Adobe released its exceptionally stable 64bit flash player for linux a few months ago). Hopefully a 64bit version of tracemonkey will be included in one of the minor upgrades before 2010, but I feel like Mozilla has made a mistake here. Update: It seems that there is no 64bit Tracemonkey code, linux or otherwise, which is surprising; I am not exactly clear as to what prevents them from releasing a 64bit version.

For a hacker, the Pre is incredible

Great stuff. Perhaps I should start looking at the Pre as one of the candidate platforms for the Geo|Ads platform and the apps it is currently featured on. Since AthensBook 1.0.0 came out in early March we've been focusing on way too many things and looking at what Palm has to one of them --- besides registering for the early SDK access back in April, there were few reasons to focus on the Pre: it is only available stateside for now, and we're already focusing on providing current releases of our apps and ad SDK on iPhone/Android and Blackberry. Still, with Android still featuring a decade-old UI and no devices not being available in Hellas in any sort of mainstream way yet [soon that's bound to change of course] and with the BlackBerry OS seeming increasingly dated, perhaps the Pre should be getting some more developer love from us. If only we could get a device in this part of the world. =)

Positive Side-effects.

Perhaps the single positive thing that may come out of the continuing and utterly pointless legal wrangling between Microsoft and the European Commission is that the totally sub-par, archetypical Windows administrator will now be forced to either go on and download the equally sub-par Internet Explorer 8 or choose one of the far superior alternatives, instead of just sitting there idle, counting the number of hotfixes that have come out of Redmond in the last month. =)

Forget me not!

Canonical announces its support for Moblin, just a year after Intel dropped Ubuntu as the basis for the project in favour of Fedora. A great move by Canonical, as Moblin seems to provide the best overall optimisations for netbooks --- and some really great æsthetics/usability --- for that class of devices.

Google Wave First Impressions

Google Wave, a new API/protocol and platform was presented on Google I It’s a hosted, embeddable communications and collaboration platform that introduces quite a few interesting features that are currently either not available or require multiple service vendors It was written in Java Google has made it clear that the protocol is going to be […]

Moblin: Proof that Corporate Support Needed.

If anything the sudden appearance of Moblin 2.0 Beta and its excellent User Interface has proven, beyond any doubt, that corporate support is essential if linux — and the open source community — is going to survive beyond a very very small niche. Linux on the server has been doing well despite Microsoft’s pretty good […]